DeFi and Infrastructure Bounty Child Bounties Update — June 2024

In April 2024, we announced that the applications for the Polkadot DeFi and Infrastructure Bounty were open to builders worldwide. The bounty has been approved by the Polkadot community and is administered by Velocity Labs in cooperation with curators from Novasama, HydraDX, Centrifuge, Moonbeam, Acala and Giotto. More information about it here.

Today we are excited to share our progress with regards to the DeFi Infra and Tooling Bounty. Together with the Bounty curators, last week we submitted our first “child bounties” that went through the voting process, awarding the following entities:

KuCoin

Type: Centralized Exchange

Deliverable: Asset Hub integration with support for USDT deposits/withdrawals

Child Bounty Size: $63,000 USD

Ecosystem Benefit: One of the goals of this bounty was to incentivize infrastructure providers like CEXs and On/Off Ramps to support Asset Hub with their services. This has several benefits to Polkadot including the improvement of accessibility to our ecosystem, specifically for stablecoin liquidity in the form of USDT and USDC. KuCoin is one of the leading CEXs , providing the Polkadot ecosystem with a significant number of users.

Status: The integration was completed back in March 2024 en par with the official announcement.

Ramp Network

Type: On/Off Ramp

Deliverable: Asset Hub integration with support for USDT, USDC and DOT deposits.

Child Bounty Size: $60,000 USD

Ecosystem Benefit: Similar to the one mentioned above for KuCoin but with the added benefit that Ramp will be supporting more assets. Ramp Network provides its users with easy ways of onramping from fiat to crypto in a simple and cost efficient way. Although CEXs provide cheaper alternatives, Onramps are able to handle payments at scale.

In addition to that, Ramp has committed to working on the integration of Asset Transfer API into their systems to be able to offer direct-to-parachain on-ramps. They are currently in talks with both Polimec and Moonbeam to enable these. Velocity Labs will be supporting them in order to continue expanding their reach.

Ramp would be the first service provider to enable these user flows, finally materializing the Asset Hub vision while abstracting it away from the user and providing infra providers with a scalable way of supporting the ecosystem without having to integrate each parachain independently. We’ll be providing more updates as Ramp communicates them to us.

Status: Delivered and announced back in April. with the direct-to-parachain on ramps still pending development.

Zapper

Type: DeFi Explorer

Deliverable: Integration of 4 EVM parachains (Astar, Hydra, Moonbeam, Acala, Hydration) into their Zapper platform.

Child Bounty Size: $118,000 total, split into 3 deliverables

Ecosystem Benefit: Zapper is one of the most widely used Portfolio Management and DeFi explorer tools in the Ethereum ecosystem. Although they have firstly kept their chain support limited to Ethereum Mainnet and the main L2s, they have now decided to branch out. Having Polkadot parachains being exposed in Zapper will provide an exposure to user bases that wouldn’t otherwise be aware of activity within Polkadot. This will create the opportunity for the initial supported parachains to acquire new users from the Ethereum world. Pending on the success of this integration, Zapper committed to making a follow-on proposal for other non-EVM parachains in the future.

Status: Zapper are currently doing both technical and product research on each of the mentioned parachains to scope out what dApps and events will be exposed in their webapp. This is a part of the first milestone, corresponding to the submitted child bounty. The rest will follow upon completion.

We’re proud to have made such advancements in just 6 months from the official incorporation of our company, and less than two months since the bounty was approved. We are now leveraging this great momentum in benefit of Polkadot and will continue to work towards new integrations, better experiences and new infrastructure.

If this sounds like a mission you’d like to jump on board of, the Bounty is ongoing and you are more than welcome to apply.